Hey folks,
Wait till you see my 25 meg steelhead!
Tom Moore
-----Original Message-----
From: Wes Neuenschwander [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2000 11:51 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Posting Photos
A couple of members have asked whether or not it's OK to
post
photographs or other digital images to the list.
Unfortunately, it's not
currently feasible to do this. In essence, handling large
attachments,
such as digital photos, scanned images - or even massive
HTML, Word
or Adobe files - are just not what email lists were designed
to do.
Fundamentally, large attachments pose two problems for the
listserver
and for the list members:
First, the shear volume. Listservers work by taking a
single email
message and resending it to all members of the list. If you
have 150
members (approximately our current membership), one 2K email
message becomes 150K of email messages. Easily manageable
by
the list server hardware and software. Add a 100K digital
image and
that becomes 15 Megs of email messages! Consider that this
single
server may be handling 100's of other email lists and that
there may be
multiple postings of large email attachments for each list,
and you're all
of a sudden dealing with gigabytes of email!
Second, the typical list member has limited resources and
has no
choice regarding whether or not he or she receives the
attachment. The
average home internet user logs in once every day or so,
using a 56K
connection (or slower!) expecting to grab his or her email
and log off, all
within a few minutes. If that day's (or week's, or
month's...) email
includes a dozen or two digital pic's, that quick check for
email turns
into "Hmmn, maybe I should walk the dog" or even "I wonder
if this
would be a good day to paint the shed". Ditto for disk
quotas: Doesn't
take long to fill that 1 Meg or even 5 Meg space that your
ISP has set
aside, when you're receiving lots of 250K email messages,
and when
that quota is filled, you don't get any more email!
(Actually, this is
already happening; I typically get 10-20 "Email Rejected.
User Mailbox
Full" messages each week.)
To avoid these problems (and to keep my ISP happy), the
WAFlyfishers
list is currently set to reject any messages over 40K in
size. Since the
average 640x480 JPG format photo is about 50-60K, it won't
make it.
Of course, you can use image processing to reduce the size
of the
photo (or the resolution) to fit within the 40K limit, but
we still face the
issue of inundating the members with long downloads, so this
should be
used with discretion (and in accord with any feedback we get
from the
list members).
So that's the long and the short of if. Email lists are
great at what they
are intended to do: Provide a quick and easy (and informal)
way of
exchanging information among a select group of people. But
they're no
substitute for web sites or other, newer internet
technologies.
My hope is to someday have a full-fledged web site to serve
as an
adjunct to the email list. A place where, in addition to
accessing the
message archives, members can post articles, pictures and
other
information that may be of interest to other list members,
as well as
providing resources similar to many of the other fly fishing
related sites.
Unfortunately - in addition to being totally web ignorant -
I've got other
competing priorities, not the least of which is fishing, so
it may be a
while. If, in the meantime, anyone else is interested in
setting up a
WAFlyfishers web site (or even a page within their existing
web site),
feel free to do so. I'm sure we'd all enjoy having a place
to share our
fishing photos and other info that doesn't work within the
email list
constraints.
I know that, I for one, would sure like to see one of those
18"
blackmouth Leland claims to be catching!!
-Wes
Wes Neuenschwander
Seattle, WA
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
